Formulation and Validation of Multidisciplinary Design Problem on Wear and Fatigue Life of Lead Screw Actuators

Multidisciplinary design optimization has been widely applied in the optimization of large-scale complex system and also in the design and optimization of components, which are involved in multidisciplinary behaviors. The wear and fatigue life of lead screw actuators is a typical multidisciplinary problem. The wear behaviors of actuators closely relate to many factors such as loads, lubrications, materials properties, surface properties, pressures, and temperature. Therefore, the wear and fatigue life of actuators cannot be modeled without a simultaneous consideration of solid mechanics, fluid dynamics, contact mechanics, and thermal dynamics. In this paper, the wear and fatigue life of a lead screw actuator is modeled and validated. Firstly, the theory of asperity contact and Archard’s model of sliding wear are applied to estimate the amount of wear under certain circumstances. Secondly, a test platform is developed based on a standard ASTM test protocol, and the wear phenomenon at the ball-on-flat sliding is measured to validate the developed wear model. Thirdly, finite element analysis is conducted using Nastran to assess the contact stresses in the lead screw and nut assembly model. The estimated data from the three sources are finally merged to formulate a mathematical model in predicting the wear and fatigue life for the optimization of lead screw actuators

Kinematic Design of a New Four Degree-of-Freedom Parallel Robot for Knee Rehabilitation

[EN] Rehabilitation robots are increasingly being developed in order to be used by injured people to perform exercise and training. As these exercises do not need wide range movements, some parallel robots with lower mobility architecture can be an ideal solution for this purpose. This paper presents the design of a new four degree-of-freedom (DOF) parallel robot for knee rehabilitation. The required four DOFs are two translations in a vertical plane and two rotations, one of them around an axis perpendicular to the vertical plane and the other one with respect to a vector normal to the instantaneous orientation of the mobile platform. These four DOFs are reached by means of two RPRR limbs and two UPS limbs linked to an articulated mobile platform with an internal DOF. Kinematics of the new mechanism are solved and the direct Jacobian is calculated. A singularity analysis is carried out and the gained DOFs of the direct singularities are calculated. Some of the singularities can be avoided by selecting suitable values of the geometric parameters of the robot. Moreover, among the found singularities, one of them can be used in order to fold up the mechanism for its transportation. it is concluded that the proposed mechanism reaches the desired output movements in order to carry out rehabilitation maneuvers in a singularity-free portion of its workspace.This work was funded by the Plan Nacional de I + D, Comision Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnologia (FEDER-CICYT) under the projects DPI2013-44227-R and DPI2017-84201-R.Aginaga, J.; Iriarte Goñi, X.; Plaza, A.; Mata Amela, V. (2018). Kinematic Design of a New Four Degree-of-Freedom Parallel Robot for Knee Rehabilitation. Journal of Mechanical Design. 140(9). https://doi.org/10.1115/1.40401681409Chablat, D., & Wenger, P. (2003). Architecture optimization of a 3-DOF translational parallel mechanism for machining applications, the orthoglide. 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